|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
1985), which follows the long culinary discourse tradition in the continent by employing the language of the kitchen to engage in a polemic on gender-based discourse and to better authorize a distinctive Woolfian room.
The second chapter, “Incorporating the Cookbook,” deals with texts that integrate recipes in the narrative. In Como agua para chocolate: Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros (Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, 1989), Laura Esquivel demonstrates the power of cooking in a literary work that is a fusion of cookbook and novel. Conversely, in Afrodita: Cuentos recetas y otros afrodisíacos (Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1997), Isabel Allende crosses genre boundaries—those between cookbook and personal memoir—to reveal the aphrodisiac power of food. A meticulous reading of Esquivel and Allende’s texts also reveals the authors’ own biases concerning weight and aging, even if they overtly make a distinct attempt to offer a liberated narrative.
Additionally, in works published after 1999, one notices an expansion of the topics of food and weight. Women authors begin to turn their attention to the exclusion and marginalization of the round-bodied woman, whom social norms perceive as the other, and instead they propose a feminine identity on their own terms. Hence, “Impossible Weight,” the third chapter, addresses the discourses of three writers who began their careers in the last decade. In Gordas: Historia de una batalla (Fat Women: History of a Battle, 2003), Isabel Velázquez combines quotations from books, newspapers, magazines, and fictional stories to reveal the prejudices against large women (and to a lesser degree against men) that prevail in today’s society. In Muerta de hambre (Starving to Death, 2005), Fernanda García Lao creates a female adolescent who transforms her gastronomic compulsions into